“I cannot rid myself of the idea that certain tributes which are tendered to living authors who are still enveloped, one might say, in the heat of battle, preset this danger: that posterity, which is always infallible, may revoke them in time, modifying or even nullifying the quite premature judgment of contemporaries.”

Most of what he wrote was a first draft. The only thing he would really change was repition, and he would change any repeated words for their synonym.

I assume his revising was all done beforehand in his preparation for writing. Yet he didn’t outline and he left behind few notes. He did have lots of maps, train schedules, and even family trees for his National Episodes, bhishe just wrote.

He had a straightforward process to writing. He did a lot of reserch – he preferred living documents over all – and then once he gathered all his notes he could write a novel very quickly, from 2 weeks to a month in some cases, but even Fortunata and Jacinta too only about a year.

Trafalgar was a large success. And it’s success was even literary in its retelling in that University Medical students were smuggling the book into lectures and so instead of learning the science of healing a Spaniard, they were learning the morality of healing one (at the expense of malpractice).

Putting the National flag on the cover was a clever marketing touch.

The narrator of Trafalgar is his humble father.

The National Episodes (Episodios nacionales ) were his cycle of Spanish history, fictionalized but grounded in real events and realized through major research and interviews with eye witnesses. A sort of precursor to Tom Wolfe and Truman Capote and those sorts of writers.

He believed that revolutions could never really bring about change, only through human reform (education, really), by reforming the national conscience could he really bring about change. He would focus on people, not so much institutions.

The two works [LA fontana de oro, and El audaz] made him realize that human institutions are fundamentally only concepts and abstractions, and that the basic reality of society is the individual.”

“It was so pleasant to dream that he was reluctant to come into contact with reality.”

He very much is a person who drinks in everything around him, filters it in his own way, then transforms it to the page. His minatures, his journalism , his wanderings around Madrid taking in the “flavor”, he’s been soaking this up for a long time.

Glados was interested “hat the novel could be converted from an agency for mere artistic pastime into a powerful instrument of social and moral education.” Like Dickens, Balzac, Tolstoy, Dostoyevsky , and others from around this time.

Don Eugenio de Ochoa: “… the past is a sepulcher; we should venerate it, but as for burying ourselves alive in it – never!”

He privately published his first novel, La Fontana de Oro because he didn’t want to publish in subscription installments as we’re popular at the time.

2 separate demonstrations: one in which the leaders could not understand what the crowd was yelling, the other where the crowd could not hear what the leaders were saying. Thus Spanish political tumult.

He joins a society club, but only for its library! Well done, Benito.

“In art imagination should function as a faculty and not an aberration or an organic vice.”

“In general, the novelist’s chief concern is the study of human behavior as a resultant of man’s inability to distinguish the real from the imaginary.”

This is what he explore in La Sombra (The Shadow).

Survivors of the clash were shot against the wall by artillery officers the next day. He was so horrified by this he ran home and took solace in his books.

He describes one of the revolutionary clashes as (the sounds of) “the groans of victims, raging oaths, bloody exaltations, hateful voices.”

Very clear, concise language that still gets across the anger and violence of the scene

“In his worship of the indigenous and the popular Glados often finds sublimity where someone less [though I’d word it as “more cynical”] prejudiced might see only bad taste.”

What I find unique about Glados is that he can see both extremes – he loves Spain and is able to see the reasons even in Spain’s bad behvaior, but he can also see the ridiculous and banal in it, too. He’s uncommonly fair and observant.

Not just being well read, but also (barring an occasional youthful severity) “His fundamental preoccupation is with the distortion of values, with the distressing distance between things as they are and things as they shoul

He tried to be a dramatist but he didn’t think much of his work – even wanted it burned. Seems he really learned how to be a writer as a journalist – would make sense since you have to be able to communicate clearly and with style to be successful – which he was.

I love the description of his “spiritual hygine” as he wanders the more humble, working class sections of the city (and the churches, too). The one street with the 88 taverns with red-painted fronts, the rhythm of speech from washer women, collecting rents and seeing the poor.

“He discovered that language was the spice of life for the humble people – and he never forgot that discovery.”

His ability to be a good sport among his friends and some musical talent loosened up his crowd and allowed him to catch the flavor of cliche and peach around him as well as the mood about events. He could break the ice then pick up the cubes.